The emergence of content syndication technologies such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and weblogs (a.k.a. blogs) has helped transform the web into an interface platform that competes with traditional news media for timely content publication, aggregation, and delivery. RSS is a web content syndication format and a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web site.
The creation and user consumption of timely blog updates are done, for the most part, manually, on desktop computers today. Moreover, many valuable information sources are not yet available as or integrated with RSS sources or other blogging tools. Furthermore, mobile users want to be able to fully participate in the web 2.0 phenomena by having the ability to publish and access timely newsworthy updates directly from their mobile devices.
The emergence of using RSS technologies along with weblogs to spread timely and personalized information on the Internet has presented challenges to traditional news and media industries. More and more Internet users are finding that they can acquire information updates from RSS sources and blog sites faster and easier than before, rather than remembering to fetch updates on a daily basis. Bloggers can configure their RSS browser to automatically check for specified news updates. Since the update's format is machine readable, the site can present the results in a summarized format for display to the bloggers. This acquisition and display process (e.g., displaying news headlines with individual items sorted by time) allows a user to completely customize a fetched site and have it automatically updated on an ongoing basis. Presently, a desktop user can easily use an Internet based browser such as Flock (http://www.flock.com), with an imbedded RSS reader, to aggregate several RSS feeds (such as news sources from CNN, CNET News, New York Times, etc.) An aggregator or news aggregator is a type of computer program (such as application software or a web application) that collects syndicated web content, such as RSS information and XML feeds from weblogs or other RSS sources.
As discussed above, RSS is a format for syndicating content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, CNN, Wall Street Journal, and personal weblogs. RSS is not just for news. Just about any content can be divided into discrete items or entries that can be syndicated via RSS. That is, content that can be composed of text media, video media, audio media, and image media can also be published in a RSS content format. When information about an RSS item is placed in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed periodically for desired information updates and react to the desired information by accessing or extracting the information and providing it to a user on, for example, his or her personal computer.
Looking at a brief history of RSS, the name “RSS” is an umbrella term for a format that spans several different versions of at least two different (but parallel) formats. The original RSS, Version 0.90, was designed by Netscape as a format for building portals of headlines to mainstream news sites. This original RSS was deemed overly complex for its goals; a simpler version, 0.91, was proposed at Netscape and subsequently dropped when Netscape lost interest in the portal-making business. But, 0.91 was picked up by another vendor, UserLand Software, which intended to use this version of RSS as a basis of its weblogging products and other web-based writing software.
In the meantime, a third non-commercial group split off and designed a new format of RSS. This new format, which is based on RDF, is called RSS 1.0. Note that, UserLand was not involved in designing this 1.0 format and, as an advocate of simplifying 0.90, UserLand was not happy when RSS 1.0 was announced. Instead of accepting RSS 1.0, UserLand continued to evolve the 0.9x branch of RSS through versions 0.92, 0.93, 0.94 and finally 2.0.
Essentially an RSS feed, regardless of its version, comprises a channel, which has a title, link, description, and (optionally) a language designation, followed by a series of items. Each of the items following the channel comprises at least a title, a link and a description of the content.
Present day RSS content is created mostly for a desktop computer environment. Mobile device users would like to obtain RSS feeds through their mobile devices, but many forms of RSS content are unsuitable for presentation to mobile users on their devices because of the resource constraints of a user's mobile device. Furthermore, a mobile user would like to control the level of content detail according to his or her individual needs or interests. Sometimes a user may want a brief amount of content; however, sometimes the user may want more detailed content. Since present-day RSS content only provides a single level of content detail for each item within an RSS feed, direct RSS content adaptation to mobile device formats does not provide an adequate solution for providing RSS content to mobile devices with the flexibility required by the users and their devices.
Thus, what is needed is a type of syndicated content format that is managed in layers of content, wherein each layer may be formatted for a different type of data content and wherein the layers may also contain levels of varying content-detail so that different content formats of different levels of detail can be provided or generated for a mobile device according to user's preferences and to the mobile device's constraints and limitations.